Salman Toor Man with Flag, 2022 Oil on linen 49 x 41 inches (124.5 x 104.1 cm)

Salman Toor’s sumptuous and insightful figurative paintings depict intimate, quotidian moments in the lives of imagined young, brown, queer men ensconced in contemporary cosmopolitan culture. His work oscillates between heartening and harrowing, seductive and poignant, inviting and eerie. 

In many of his paintings, he creates subtly disarming depictions of familiar domestic environments in which often-marginalized bodies flourish in safety and comfort. In other pieces, Toor creates allegorical spaces of waiting, anticipation, and apprehension; border crossings into a world that may or may not be welcoming. Central to his work are the anxieties and the comedies of identity. In creating his figures, he employs and destabilizes specific tropes in order to reflect on the way difference is perceived by the self and by others. As Whitney curators Christopher Lew and Ambika Trasi have noted, Toor’s project is one that examines “vulnerability within contemporary public and private life and the notion of community in the context of queer, diasporic identity.” Furthermore, in depicting the mundane and the memorable moments of his characters’ lives, Toor reveals a deeply relatable existence, ultimately creating an opportunity for empathy through the language of painting.  

Salman Toor Thanksgiving, 2022 Oil on canvas 69 x 50 inches (175.3 x 127 cm)

Toor was born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1983 and currently lives and works in New York. He studied painting and drawing at Ohio Wesleyan University and received his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. A widely acclaimed two-part solo exhibition, Salman Toor: Wish Maker, was recently on view at Luhring Augustine Chelsea + Tribeca (June-July 2025), and in October 2026, Salman Toor: Someone Like You, will open at The Courtauld in London. In 2022, Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work accompanied by cat